Cognitive Services – What is that?

Microsoft just published a new article on the topic of Cognitive Services (formerly Project Oxford). The Cognitive Services are a collection of SDKs and APIs along with services which should make your life easier if you want to build an intelligent application. These services basically leverage Microsoft’s existing platforms and services like Machine Learning and so on to enable developers to create applications with intelligent features like the following:

Emotion Detection

Video Detection

Speech Detection

Face Recognition

Speech Recognition

Vision Recognition

Language Understanding

Speech Understanding

Our vision is for more personal computing experiences and enhanced productivity aided by systems that increasingly can see, hear, speak, understand and even begin to reason.

The services are all hosted in Azure datacenters to ensure high performance and ease of use. You can start integrating these nice APIs and SDKs as Microsoft offers you to start with a free trial with the ability to upgrade it for production use later on. As all the APIs have a free trial plan to start with you can basically explore each service to find out if that fits your application and if it has the features you need to deploy an intelligent application…